Highlights
The Merge
Mainnet Shadow Fork 11 happened successfully and MSF 12 will happen in next week. Marius from the Geth team told that there were some issues with Erigon client in proposing the blocks which Parithosh Jayanthi said that they are aware of the issue and the team is looking into it.
On a side note- Ethereum foundation is running a bug bounty program in which you can earn upto a million dollars depending upon the kind of bug found.
This week the client teams have released their merge-client releases (for context - if you are a miner on the Ethereum Network then you need to upgrade both the Execution and Consensus layer clients and sync them together as after the transition into PoS both these clients have to work in harmony).
Merge- client releases
There were some syncing issues between some of the Execution and Consensus layer clients, and many clients had to make minor adjustments to produce blocks correctly. Client teams are working on fixing these issues some related to merge some related to JSON RPC because they have to ensure the security of the network post-merge.
Raul Jordon from Prysm, mentioned that after the client release they got to know that many people actually don't have any information that they need to run a second client software too. To this Nethermind team also added that they are also receiving a quite negative feedback from the community as they think that the complexities have been increased. Some educational material was shared by Danny Ryan in order to increase awareness about both the softwares
Supplementary Guide to Staking on Ethereum For Existing Stakers
EthStaker Validator Workshop #4
Danny Ryan also added that the developers will be hosting a merge community call #7 on Sept 9, node operators can join this call and may ask their doubts about node configurations, The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for Sept 6th and technically only CL clients are needed to be upgraded for that but little over a week later the Paris upgrade which is the second part of the merge transition is also set to happen and that requires both client implementations. Nethermind team is working on a click node setup called Sedge which will link both EL and CL clients of your choice but it is still in its testing stage although some single node operators can still use it.
MEV Boost updates
Raul Jordan mentioned the research which is going on to remove the need of trusted relays in MEV boost so that there is no need of having third party block builders as it might not be the most secure way. Developers are going to keep the discussion running around how to use threshold encryption in MEV boost in their communication channels.
Prysm and Teku client teams also informed that they have implemented the circuit breaker functionality. For Prysm the validators who fail to propose blocks of 3 slots consequetively or 8 blocks in total in a entire epoch will be disconnected automatically from using MEV boost.
Likewise for Teku if the validator misses 8 slots in an epoch will get disconnected. Lodestar is also working towards this implementation and while Nimbus team might not have this functionality.
Discussion on EIP-4844
Developers raised two questions, first being about the gas pricing strategy on which it is not yet clear if they want to keep the base fees for rollup initiated transactions for short bursts or a constant stream. The discussions on the topic will keep on happening in the future calls.
The second question that was raised was about blobs on wether the rollup initiated transactions should be coupled with block syncing or not. The syncing might increase the complexity without giving much perpetual relief to the validators or maybe not, hence there were no clear answers put forward but the discussions will be going on.
Slashing updates
Post-merge after the PoS transition there will be a series of Rewards and Penalties which will help in incentivising the good validators and penalising the malicious ones. But there are a few general misconceptions about how something is a malicious behaviour and why slashing is a part of the protocol, so, Micah Zoltu put forwarded a message signaling the core devs to generally (not officially) just try to create more awareness about the protocol's howabouts.
Read more about Ethereum in previous Bulletins -Ethereum Bulletin
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